A thin branch bearing a lot of weight

At General Conference, the Connectional Table made a report on the state of the church. During that report, the presenters said we could find more information online about some of the things they discussed. I was interested to learn what more information I could find, especially about reports from various parts of the world speaking to what people valued in the UMC and what they wanted to see for the future of the UMC. So I went digging.

One of the coolest things in the 2023 State of the Church report is the year in photos from UM News. There are a lot of really striking and compelling images in there and it is well worth your time to scroll through that.

One of the most unintentionally ironic parts of the report was the use of John Wesley’s dying words to express our denominational resolve to move forward.

“The United Methodist Church has faced many new challenges over the past couple years, but we continue to see God at work in our daily lives and in our enduring ministries. Like John Wesley, who said ‘The best of all is God is with us,’ we look to God to guide our witness.”

But I was really there because I wanted to read what these reports, collected during a project called Imagining the Future, could tell me about the state of United Methodism. The presentation at General Conference gave a high-level summary of what they took to be most important points, but I was interested in the what each region had to say.

Unfortunately, I could only download 3 of the reports. The report from the conversations in Africa could not be found. There is a page giving some summary of the findings of the Africa report, but the link to download the report itself was broken. When I asked UM News about this on Twitter, they reported that they did not have the full report and changed the link on the report summary page to indicate that it was connected to survey questions rather than the answers those questions generated.

I was disappointed to not be able to read the African report, but the others did provide some interesting reading.

Europe – There was a glitch with this report as well, apparently. There were five online conversations across Europe in 2021 to gather data for the report, but nearly all of the 90 participants in those conversations were from Western European countries, so the report lacked perspective from United Methodism in Eastern Europe.

One or two things that stood out to me in the 5-page report was the clear awareness United Methodists in Europe have of being a tiny minority compared to the national churches that dominate Europe. These United Methodists said that they value their Methodist identity grounded in “classic” Methodist theology. The report includes specific mention of prevenient grace, sanctification, personal piety, and social engagement as core Methodist themes that they value. The report mentions their zeal for scriptural holiness and for meeting the spiritual and temporal needs of people. It highlights the plight of immigrants, climate change, racism, and economic justice as key social concerns. “Europeans want a
Christ‐centered mission grounded in disciple‐ship, the Bible, and prayer.”

The Philippines – This report was collected via an online survey of 357 United Methodists across 3 episcopal areas. The respondents self-identified as 56.3% traditionalist and 44.8% progressive, but said that 68.6% of their congregations were mostly traditionalist. When asked how they would change the UMC, only 10% identified removing language around homosexuality as one of their choices.

The structure of the survey used to collect the data seemed somewhat simplistic or amateurish. Without open-ended questions or more professional survey construction, it was hard for me to see much more of great significance or interest in the report.

The United States – This report is the longest. It was collected from the conversations of 54 groups of people from November 2021 to March 2022. The participants were by invitation only and multiple groups were composed of members of the Connectional Table itself,. The inclusion of the Connectional Table in the data collection is an odd choice if the purpose of the process was to get information that the Connectional Table could use to understand the denomination. The report is aware that its sample could bias findings and mentions that the key themes could be quite different if different groups were invited to participate.

The report is too long to fairly summarize, but a couple of things did stand out to me.

The American report makes reference to “social justice” far more frequently and more prominently than the other two reports. It also places a high emphasis on inclusivity and diversity, while expressing a sense of frustration that we do not live into diversity and inclusivity or put our social justice commitments into action enough.

The report expresses both appreciation for and frustration with our “democratic” polity. The voice we give to laity is seen as important, but our polity can also be a source of division and legalism.

One other thing I notice is a lack of any direct emphasis on salvation or converting people to faith in Jesus Christ. Of the three reports, the American one was the one that seemed least engaged with piety, evangelism, and the Bible. Perhaps I am being unfair. You can read the report yourself and decide.

I am certain that these reports involved a lot of effort, but given the prominence they got in the Connectional Table report at General Conference the reports themselves read to me like rather anecdotal and even a bit haphazard in their data gathering. In the American report, we are told that Connectional Table has been using these reports (including the missing African one, presumably) to cast a vision for the future of the UMC and “coalesce around common ideas” to shape the denomination.

If we are really trying to develop a nuanced and useful understanding of the state of the UMC today and the diversity of hopes and dreams for the UMC in the future, perhaps a more systematic and sophisticated form of data collection would be helpful.

Let’s try being Methodists again

When John Wesley looked back at his journey to true Christian faith, he could spot some stages that he passed through.

There was the period in his young life where he indulged in rather than fought against his sins. I suspect even in this stage Wesley appeared more serious-minded and sober than most young people who are in rebellion against their upbringing, but Wesley certainly was consistent in saying he had his season in which he “willingly served sin.”

That era ended when he was a student at Oxford and came across writings and teachers convincing him that the only way to peace and happiness in this life is holiness and total commitment to God. This began a long period in his life where he battled mightily against sin but could not overcome it. He described this period of his life in his journals, sermons, and other writings. Here is an example:

“In this vile, abject state of bondage to sin, I was indeed fighting continually, but not conquering. Before I had willingly served sin; now I was unwillingly; but still I served it. I fell, and rose, and fell again. Sometimes I was overcome, and in heaviness. Sometimes I overcame and was in joy. … During this whole struggle between nature and grace, which had now continued above 10 years, I had many remarkable returns to prayer; especially when I was in trouble: I had many sensible comforts; which are indeed no other than short anticipations of the life of faith. But I was still ‘under the law,’ not ‘under grace:’ (The state most who are called Christians are content to live and die in:) For I was only striving with, not freed from sin. Neither had I the witness of the Spirit with my spirit, and indeed could not; for I ‘sought it not by faith, but as it were by the works of the law.'”

Wesley observed that most Christians were content to live and die in this state — where they struggle against sin but cannot be freed from sin. I think that is no less true today. I think we also have a lot of Christians — and a vastly larger number of non-Christians — who do not struggle against sin at all. They struggle in many ways, but they do not see sin as the source of their problems. Both inside the church and certainly outside, there is a large throng who finds the very idea of being “under the law” repulsive.

But ignoring that group for now, numerous as they are, we often seem like a church that has settled into embracing what Wesley had before Aldersgate. We even lift that up as the very essence of Methodism.

I cannot even guess how many times I have heard Methodist leaders lift up a kind of works righteousness that would have pleased young Wesley. I cannot tell you how many times I have heard someone remind me that Methodists have three simple rules: Do no harm, do good, and stay in love with God.

The people who offer those to us as a guide to the Christian life are very sincere, but it is a tragically misguided thing to offer us. It is offering a vision of Wesleyanism as if Aldersgate never happened.

Yes, John Wesley included a version of those “three simple rules” in his general rules for the united societies, but those were not the point of Methodism, they were the barest test of whether someone should be a part of the movement at all. They were like the sign at the amusement park that says, “You must be this tall to ride.”

As Wesley wrote over and over and over again, doing no harm, doing good, and being a good church person did not make you a Christian. The only thing that made you a Christian was a full reliance and trust on the blood of Christ as your salvation, your hope, and your righteousness.

In place of this faith, too often, we in the church today offer people more stuff to do, more causes to support, and more opinions to parrot. We create a vision of Christianity that finds salvation in being a “community” or doing good works. I’ve heard so many people speak about the purpose of the church exclusively in terms of the good works we do that I wonder if we’ve ever read anything Wesley wrote. The vision of Christianity that we offer the world is a program for building up our own righteousness, and we can often sound pretty self-righteous when we sell it.

Young John Wesley would have been on board with that vision, at least to a point. Unlike us, Wesley was obsessed with overcoming sin and heart-broken that he could not. He was desperate to be freed from the grip of sin in his life. You can spend years in a Methodist church today and never get any idea that the biggest problem in the world is that we are held captive by sin. I know this is true because I spent many years in a Methodist church and never heard about that, and I listen to a lot of Methodist sermons and read a lot of what we say about the problems of the world.

I believe God raised up a people called Methodist by first saving a John and Charles Wesley from both their sin and their misunderstanding of the very purpose of Christianity. Hymns like “O For A Thousand Tongues to Sing” (read the longer version on page 58 of the hymnal) and “And Can It Be” encapsulate the joy of this double salvation. Over the centuries since Aldersgate, we have lost sight of that. In the 20th century, the Methodist church gave up on the things that made us Methodist and sank into the mélange of mainline Protestant churches that had cultural influence and practiced the forms of religion with none of the power of it. As cultural Christianity has withered and died in America over the last 3-4 generations, the Methodist church has collapsed with it.

We need a new Aldersgate. We need first to want it. We need to ask the Holy Spirit to give it to us. Wesley spent 10 years struggling and failing. Perhaps it will take us even longer, but if God is not through with the United Methodist Church, we need to remember why he raised up a people called Methodist in the first place.

Three days that made Aldersgate possible

May 24, 1738, is a day known to a great many Methodists. It is the day John Wesley came to a living faith in Christ and assurance that his sins had been forgiven. We rightly remember this day.

So, too, should we recall the days that came before. If May 24 was the climax of the story, the days — even the years — that came before set the stage. In his journal, Wesley recounts a letter he wrote to a friend that the shared his turmoil and despair in the three days before May 24, which he called days of “continual sorry and heaviness in my heart.”

“I see that the whole law of God is holy, just and good. I know every thought, every temper of my soul ought to bear God’s image an superscription. But how I am fallen from the glory of God! I feel ‘that I am sold under sin.’ I know, that I too deserve nothing but wrath, being full of abominations: And having no good thing in me, to atone for them, or to remove the wrath of God. All my works, my righteousness, my prayers, need an atonement for themselves.”

I genuinely wonder how a 30-something bachelor clergy member in the United Methodist Church today would be treated if he were to express such a troubled state of soul. Would we start by trying to argue him out of his premises. I fear we would.

I fear that a lot of the energy in “counseling” young Rev. Wesley would be to to shake him loose of “fundamentalist” reading the Bible and his obsession with wrath and sin. I fear we would try to talk him out of a sense of his own sinfulness rather than seek to pray him through it.

How would we respond to him when he insists that he deserves nothing but wrath from God and that there is nothing good in him at all? How would we answer when he says that his prayers themselves are an offense and require their own atonement because they do not spring from a true faith in Christ’s saving work? How would he score on the psychological evaluation, I wonder.

And yet, please recall, this is exactly the state of soul that made Wesley ready for May 24. It is this despair and desperation that made what happened that evening on Aldersgate Street in London a day many Methodists still rejoice over.

Hear how Wesley further wrote to his friend in the days before.

“O let no one deceive us by vain words, as if we had already attained this faith! By its fruits we shall know. Do we already feel ‘peace with God,’ and ‘joy in the Holy Ghost?’ Does ‘his Spirit bear witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God?’ Alas, with mine He does not.”

This is the result of what we often call prevenient grace. Here is the conviction that comes upon a sinner in whom God grace has stirred up a sense of his own powerlessness and need. What sad words are those he writes. He seeks peace and has none. He desires joy, and cannot find it. He longs to know himself to be a child of God, and yet the Spirit remains silent.

Is it possible that United Methodism would hold Wesley up as a model in this day? Could we imagine a United Methodism in America that points to words like these and says, “This is the way to real faith.” I fear we would view Wesley — if he were among us — as a fanatic or a fundamentalist rather than as the father of our movement.

How wonderful it would be if we could learn to teach our people to find themselves in a place where they could pray with Wesley, “O thou Saviour of men, save us from trusting in anything but Thee! Draw us after Thee! Let us be emptied of ourselves, and then fill us with all peace and joy in believing; and let nothing separate us from thy love, in time or eternity.”

This is the prayer that might once again be answered in this way, “I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust Christ, Christ alone for my salvation: And an assurance was given me, that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.”

Wouldn’t it be great if United Methodism could pray that prayer?

Do you want that, too?